Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), including those who otherwise require less support, face severe difficulties in everyday social interactions. Research in this area has primarily focused on identifying the cognitive and neurological differences that contribute to these social impairments, but social interaction by definition involves more than one person and social difficulties may arise not just from people with ASD themselves, but also from the perceptions, judgments, and social decisions made by those around them. Here, across three studies, we find that first impressions of individuals with ASD made from thin slices of real-world social behavior by typically-developing observers are not only far less favorable across a range of trait judgments compared to controls, but also are associated with reduced intentions to pursue social interaction. These patterns are remarkably robust, occur within seconds, do not change with increased exposure, and persist across both child and adult age groups. However, these biases disappear when impressions are based on conversational content lacking audio-visual cues, suggesting that style, not substance, drives negative impressions of ASD. Collectively, these findings advocate for a broader perspective of social difficulties in ASD that considers both the individual’s impairments and the biases of potential social partners.
The amount of “aspie supremacy” in this thread with zero push back is concerning to me. Allistic people aren’t inherently immoral and autistic people aren’t inherently moral and pure. I’m far too frequently hurt and misunderstood by non-autistic people and desperately wish things weren’t this way, but viewing people with this lens is harmful to everyone. That mindset discourages autistics from trying to form relationships with the vast majority of society and makes mass organizing effectively out of the question
The research itself is a bit depressing but it sounds like it may align with work done by autistic researchers on the double empathy problem
They’re acting like weirdo R*ddit dweebs lol. Autism mostly makes me vocal stim at 3 in the morning and have expansive standard operating procedures on something as mundane as microwaving a burrito. My crappy social skills is more about me being the weird kid going through home and school trauma and poorly equipped with the means to navigate through social environments than anything about autism in general. I guess I have that thing where I hate eye contact, but that’s honestly shitty Western social customs since plenty of cultures think Westerners staring at each other’s eyes is creepy unhinged shit.
I always disliked having poor social skills or being socially ostracized to be centered within discussions about autism. Plenty of NTs have trash social skills, and plenty of NDs, even people with autism, have good social skills. I don’t really see the difference between an NT with shitty social skills and an autist with shitty social skills. They’ll both be unfunny, give creepy vibes, don’t understand how to navigate their bodies in social spaces, not understand jokes, not know how to start or continue a conversation, and so on. Like, just because people were autism are incapable of having good social skills (I don’t agree with this characterization, but for the sake of argument let’s accept it) doesn’t mean that NTs are somehow naturally born with good social skills. I’m sorry, but I don’t have the ability to see someone with poor social skills and go, “You can tell that they don’t have autism but is just an NT with poor social skills.” Must be the autism in me.
And don’t even get me started at, “Autism is like a truth serum man, so we can’t lie unlike the duplicitous en-tee.” Get the fuck over yourself. I can see that autism apparently doesn’t stop them from entertaining self-delusions about the alleged moral superiority of autists over NTs (and the rest of NDs apparently). Autists are the master race, NTs are untermenschen, and allist NDs fit in some intermediate tier within this fucked up hierarchy where they are better than the NT cattle but nowhere near as good the autist ubermensch.
I’m glad we’re moving past “autism is about having a persecution complex against shitty NT and NDs-who-don’t-have-autism-that-we’ll-pretend-are-NTs-to-push-a-narrative bullies” and towards “autism is about being a trans furry with cute plushies.”
Can I ask why is every single industry heavily critiqued by leftists for being a “psychological op” but somehow the DSM-5 is this one holy grail that is totally untouched and everything they say is the truth?
“Double empathy problem” is such a weird way to put it. It’s just a mind reading loop problem that anyone can go through, it doesn’t matter if you’re NT or ND, literally everyone is different. You’re literally doing another “Human nature” argument and you can’t debunk me so you’ll rage and fling shit at me. Because I can see right trough you.
I saw this before seeing most of the rest of the thread and holy shit, I figured there’d be some awful takes but it’s so much worse. Like basically eugenicist shit and then the top reply is “actually, they’re even more inferior than you think”.
Maybe this less common context is a good opportunity to consider the vicious moralism and worldviews that are less concerned with making the world a better place or learning how to constructively talk with people and just being reduced to an absolute seething hatred of [social majority] that gravitates toward whatever vapid rhetoric lets one vent the most bile. It’s the “ideology” of someone who has given up on socialism in any real sense and just wants to either feel superior in their corner or genuinely hurt people for the sake of revenge.
I know exactly what reply I’m going to get from at least one user, so stay tuned!
It’s literally just incel shit for leftist NDs (and I try not to wave the flag too often, but like, I am so off in the weeds that the psych people think I am either ADD or extremely high functioning ASD or Asperger’s, like strange enough that I have at least two studies written with me as one of the central subjects, which made growing up not very fun).
Extremely frustrating. Like, much of the shit coming out of here is stuff I’ve literally heard Peter Thiel or Elon Musk say on a podcasts.
nah fuck off with that. incels blame women for things that aren’t womens’ fault or responsibility to fix, while we face structural discrimination that is the fault of the people perpetuating it who do owe us not being bigots.
I think that being isolated by your peers does a lot to warp your opinion of them into unpleasant places. It’s most visible within the incel groups, since they are relatively well organized and share common beliefs that turn them into lolcows for the average person, but I see no reason that social isolation should effect people who aren’t starting off from a position susceptible to incel adjacent ideas in a substantially different way. In my own experiences with social isolation, I have noticed misanthropic ideas about other people and their motivations spring up with little backing that then require effort to suppress.
I absolutely agree, having suffered the same feelings myself, however, I am going to call it for what it is. I will not validate this stuff, it is reactionary and self-defeating.
I agree. I’m not gonna blame them, in fact I wish I was them, it would make life 200% easier
I don’t know if you’re talking about sensory sensitivity or something, but a lot of the time when people say this (as in the OOP), they are talking about social circumstances that are overwhelmingly caused by bigotry and lack of education in broader population on this issue and what it can mean to be autistic. Insofar as that is the issue, the problem is not your biology, the problem is society hating people for being born differently, and society can and should be changed.
I’m extremely surprised that the text-only trials had results as good as they did. It’s been my experience that people can detect something “off” from text alone as readily as they can from audio conversations or in-person interactions.
Regardless of medium – email, instant message, forum post, fiction writing – I have received feedback that my communication style is offputting, robotic, unemotional, pompous, direct (negative connotation), and more. If I try to compensate for lack of emotion by including emojis in emails/messages, I’m told it comes across as inauthentic, performative.
TBH, a large part of this is that people pick on non-verbal clues that someone is willing to interact, so when people don’t see those clues, they assume that autistic people are unwilling to talk. And that’s why those biases disappear, when conversation is actually underway, because then people see that the autistic person is willing to interact.
I know all too well :(
Putting another one in the “yeah I actually do have to mask super heavy, wear the right clothes, do the correct makeup, and make the right impression off the bat” box. That box is getting really heavy.
not only far less favorable across a range of trait judgments compared to controls, but also are associated with reduced intentions to pursue social interaction. These patterns are remarkably robust, occur within seconds, do not change with increased exposure, and persist across both child and adult age groups.
I fucking hate being autistic.
I just want fucking friends. Social connection. A partner. I’m a decent enough person. I do all the right things. I don’t do anything super annoying or invasive, if anything I’m really quiet and timid. I treat people well. I do the right things. And no one fucking likes or wants me. I had a coworker the other day tell me everyone thought I was weird when I first started. And I mean, I can tell I’m on the outside. I haven’t hung out or exchanged numbers with anyone. It makes me so sad. And it’s not even just about this one job or whatever, it’s knowing it will always be like this. I thought a bit of socializing would make me get it, but no I’m a fucking autist and so everyone is going to hate me. They decided within seconds I’m not worth their time and they won’t change their minds.
I don’t get it. Why do people make these judgements and how are they so fast?
It’s because it isn’t a judgement so much as a reflex, instantly processed from environmental cues in the same way that you can tell that someone was just in the room without actually being aware that it came from registering and collating numerous tiny changes. If it were a conscious judgement, then we could simply ask for the reasoning.
We communicate a lot with our environment, and it shapes and defines us in ways that bypass conscious awareness, and then blends in with our sense of self anyway - a self that is patchwork and fuzzy and intermittent, but has a little circuit that makes it think it’s a smooth continuum. We don’t recognise faces because we see the world and it contains faces. We recognise faces because there’s a specialised subsystem that recognises faces and if that subsystem doesn’t function then it doesn’t matter that we can see them - and if a magic knife cut that subsystem out of my head I would not feel any change. Maybe.
Like many things our brains evolved on the way to sapience, social reflexes aren’t necessarily functional in a way that is beneficial to our current circumstances, and wouldn’t necessarily present in the same way in the context they arose in. There are way more of us, we interact shallowly and briefly all the time, we’re all atomised and alone and afraid and held in the jaws of Capital.
People can learn elsewise. It isn’t really in their interests under capitalism, but they might accidentally believe the wrong parts of the liberalism stuff, or stumble across a shared humanity, or just be kinda cool like that.
And it’s important to remember that there isn’t really such a thing as a (edit: perfectly) neurotypical person, just like there’s no average person, and I don’t know what I’m talking about.
My theory on this is that they expect the social routine to be, well, routine. Societies develop certain unwritten rules for social interactions reinforced through the routines and observations thereof.
So when someone doesn’t fit neatly into the routine and there’s no immediately obvious indication of why (child, someone from outside the culture), their instinct is to disengage, and often assign the lack of following of routine to rudeness. As much as the prevalence of the spectrum has gotten increased attention in recent years, there’s still a piss poor awareness of what social interactions are like for people on the spectrum. The sort of caricatures of people with autism the media tends to present don’t help either.
The human brain evolved for group dynamics and social hierarchy over truth and logical thinking, it’s instinctual. In the same way you recoil at a hot stove, they judge your social value in an instant. Then, they have to justify why they don’t like you so they don’t feel like they’re a bad person. This is why NTs think NDs are “rude” or “strange.” They literally make up shit to make themselves feel better for hating you.
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I think it’s just something brains do unconsciously and automatically. You ever “feel” something in your gut? You just “know” something, or it “feels like something is off”? It can’t be logically justified, they just feel like something is different about us. Brains hate that.
What pisses me off about it is people not revisiting these snap judgements.
In fairness, as someone with ASD, I also similarly judge that allistic people are not worth my time.
Neuro"typical" people are literally natural born liars. Lying is part of their nature - and so it is in their nature to lie. They spend so much time lying that they invent different faces, and create different layers of self with different layers of lies. They spend so much time trying to figure out each others true intentions that they exhaust themselves. It is, in fact, even sometimes challenging for neuro"typical" people to figure out where their own lies end and their true self begins. Meanwhile, normal people with ASD are pure and straight-forward.
Neuro"typical" people argue that people with ASD have difficulty communicating. – In my experience, people with ASD communicate directly, clearly, with rarely any attempt to hide their intentions. Neuro"typical" people are the ones who struggle to express their meaning and intents clearly to others.
Neuro"typical" people argue that people with ASD are too focused on details. – In my experience, when something really needs figured out or completed with a degree of care, they turn to someone with ASD to solve the puzzle while the neuro"typicals" attempt to claim credit.
Find your tribe. Ignore the allistics - “everything” is clearly not all it’s cracked up to be.
Lying is part of their nature - and so it is in their nature to lie. They spend so much time lying that they invent different faces, and create different layers of self with different layers of lies. They spend so much time trying to figure out each others true intentions that they exhaust themselves. It is, in fact, even sometimes challenging for neuro"typical" people to figure out where their own lies end and their true self begins
This is pretty close to
territory I thinkDoes this extend to allistic ND people like, say, ADHD? I do not claim to have the same struggles as someone with ASD. I find that conversations with NT people are often guarded at first because there are a great number of people who are trying to get one over on everyone they meet. The ‘average’ NT uses a lot of these social cues to subconsciously evaluate whether they’re being tricked. I find my ND comrades are more willing to share personal information and have deep conversations before they even get to know me. This sometimes makes me worry that these same comrades may be easily scammed or otherwise manipulated by bad actors.
Sometimes I think that all non-ADHD people really enjoy working and all they want to do is make routines and plan stuff out and clean up and give me shit for not constantly being productive. This is not the case, it’s just where most of my negative interactions come from. I, again, don’t know your struggles but to claim that people without ASD are “literally natural born liars. Lying is part of their nature” is really concerning.
“NTs and by NTs I actually mean people who don’t have autism are only capable of lying unlike us honest autists” is certainly a take.
There’s nothing about autism that would prevent someone with autism from lying by omission or lying through self-deception. Just because autism prevents someone from convincingly lying that you don’t fat in that dress doesn’t mean that people with autism are incapable of much more serious lies.
I agree with you comrade but your judgement and theirs is completely different.
You consciously identify that they’re not worth interacting with and decide not to. They unconsciously decide to hate you and then make up reasons for why they feel this way. Your thoughts follow some logical process, theirs is pure cognitive dissonance.
I doubt I’m any more or less logical than them, I simply found my made up reasons. That said, I’m going to allow myself a little prejudice as a treat. Just a little indulgence for the luxury of safety.
For real, so many NT people make a game out of “let’s see how overtly I can bully this person without them realizing what I’m doing” and I’m like… why? What’s the appeal?
so many NT people make a game out of “let’s see how overtly I can bully this person without them realizing what I’m doing”
Where does this happen? The only examples of this I can think of are when you give a trainee/apprentice wrong information with the intent of having them ask someone a very silly question for fun. Not saying it’s not bullying in that scenario but may I ask where else you’ve experienced it?
Let me put it this way: when I was in school, a lot of the other kids picked up on the fact that I was awful at detecting sarcasm and subtext and used that to subtly insult me to my face. I only fully realized what was happening in hindsight, but I often had a nagging suspicion that there was a joke that everybody was in on except me.
Or, hell. Just look at the shit that happened to Chris Chan. I’ve read a frankly embarrassing amount about her, and her undercover stalkers (calling them “trolls” is underselling what they actually did) loved to slip in lots of little clues that they were fucking with her and delight when she failed to pick up on them.
Okay, you made it seem like it was ubiquitous.
Your experience in school is horrible. I don’t think using kids, who’ve not fully had their brains develop, as an example of what the average person is like is fair.
Similarly, using the actions of 4chan and kiwifarms and other harassment sites as a way to suggest this behavior is due to being neurotypical is a poor choice
I have met more ASD people than I can count who have lived some version of this same story.
If your point was originally about children I apologize. I was under the impression you were saying that a large number of NT people find it fun to torment people with ASD as adults. Bullying happens at all ages and horrible people are everywhere but I don’t think it’s because they lack ASD.
i don’t think you need to scarequotes typical, that’s a statistical designation that replaces “normal” because less common neurologies are still normal.
interested to see a version of these experiments that also accounts for race/ethnicity
Despite this being well known information, hexbear users call me a misanthrope doomer when I say that neurotypical people are at best inherently amoral. They get absolutely livid when I extend this principle to other marginalized groups like the disabled and unattractive too.
Neurotypical people are sincerely horrifying creatures. Their unconscious makes a decision to dislike someone and then their ego will defend that even if they contradict themselves doing so. Argue with a NT long enough and they’ll change why they did/didn’t do something without any reflection. Their selfhood is one big justification machine for their unconscious mind.
Neurotypical people are sincerely horrifying creatures. Their unconscious makes a decision to dislike someone and then their ego will defend that even if they contradict themselves doing so. Argue with a NT long enough and they’ll change why they did/didn’t do something without any reflection. Their selfhood is one big justification machine for their unconscious mind.
That’s just people in general. Everyone’s unconsciousness makes snap decisions. Autism doesn’t make you not have an unconsciousness. Autism doesn’t inherently make you self-reflective either.
It’s not just NT though, almost all humans operate under a post-facto morality. Not amoral, just not the same consistent morality. We, almost always, make decisions in the moment, then if challenged, justify them through a moral lens.
That doesn’t mean things can’t become better and more consistent. You can doom all you want, but the fact of the matter is that it is possible to create environments that develop class consciousness and center your actions around the protection of the community, including the most vulnerable. However, it requires training and discipline, for NT and ANT alike (especially NT) because we are surrounded by a mass culture and media environment that constantly tells us to do and feel the opposite of that.
I wonder whether this would persist in a classless society. Neurotypicals are highly attuned to dominance hierarchies, so we might suddenly be worthy of being understood in their eyes if there was no eugenics structure for them to protect their investment in.
People are still gonna react negatively to a faux pas even in FALGSC star trek future
The classlessness is what will give them the breathing room to reexamine their first reaction and personally grow like at the end of a TNG episode. Likewise we NDs would be less awkward because less shunned and traumatized in our development.
My hypothesis is that the neurotypicals’ miserliness with their curiosity and hypervigilance around hierarchy is massively inflamed by the pressures capital places on them, and the stubborn snap judgments are the honed adaptation of a depleted and degraded creature. I believe staying weirdly judgmental and incurious in a classless society, one that isn’t marinating in capitalism’s nonstop threats and scarcities, would itself become a greater faux pas.
On the plus side, in such a future you wouldn’t have to worry about those negative reactions resulting in you becoming homeless, starving, and without medical care because your dickhead manager fired you for “not being a team player”
Bullying exists and has existed in all classes, cultures, histories, and societies. Humans naturally judge others, even if it’s unconscious. The ND will always be hated, even in a classless society.
Some people are born with facial structure that 95% of people will instinctually find attractive. Some people are born with the opposite and will be hated for the crime of existing.
Some people are born with facial structure that 95% of people
this is highly regionalized and we could remove much of the globalizing influence of media dominance. Western standards of beauty have changed drastically since the 90s and what was “in” then was very different from the 1950s
No society or region has ever found asymmetric faces attractive. There is always minor variances of preferences, no one denies that. But in no world will someone considered horrifically ugly be considered a catch elsewhere.
Just another person justifying their hatred because they don’t want to admit their biases.
i’m ND but ok. asymmetrical hair has been popular at various times, no reason that couldn’t expand to faces in a better society not dominated by american capitalist media.
Not the best group to emulate but fencing scars used to be desirable among aristocrats.
And you are just looking for another excuse to justify your depression and misanthropy. See how easy this game is to play?
Don’t just accuse people of operating under bad faith, unless you, yourself want to be accused of it.
Nothing they said was wrong. And you aren’t wrong either. However, we don’t know exactly what a future industrialized classless society will look or act like, and assuming data from our current societies is exactly the same kind of thin-slice bullshit people in this thread are accusing NT people of doing.
The fact of the matter is that in archeological evidence, we have evidence for horrifically maimed or disabled people being well cared for even in hunter gatherer societies. We also have evidence of certain societies practicing the kind of mass cannibalism that would sell well in a Victorian drama. It’s a mixed bag.
Humans are extremely complex social creatures who both manipulate, and are manipulated by, their environment. This means that reckless optimism or pessimism about ‘human nature’ is entirely unwarranted.
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It’s really all about lookism and pretty privilege. Ugly and autistic means you’re creepy and weird. Attractive and autistic means you’re charming and funny without even trying.
I think you need to look at it in a more intersectional way comrade.
Being attractive can certainly make up for social deficiencies caused by autism but they are still worse off than a similarly attractive NT. A wealthy POC lives a much more privileged life than one in poverty. However, they both experience negative effects stemming from their race. No amount of money or power will turn them white, just reduce the negative effects of race. Lookism is absolutely a real thing but it merely alleviates the difficulties of being ND.
I don’t know why, but I assumed “thin slice judgements” would somehow be about how you cut your bread
they’re evaluating whether you studied the blade
To be honest I have ADHD and I will judge you if you cut my bread poorly.
